Loving Modigliani

Afterlife: A Gothic Fairy Tale-3

The door burst open and someone came into the other room. Modi? I cried out. Had he come to get me? But the warped floorboards creaked under the weight of heeled pumps and sabots clattering into the studio.

A woman’s voice said, “She must be in the other room,” and the footsteps advanced to where I was.

Glancing in the mirror, I saw two women and a girl: Zbo’s wife, Hanka, and her friend Gosia, one of Modi’s recent models for his nudes. The girl was Annie, who looked after Ortiz’s children downstairs and occasionally modeled for him too. Hanka carried a mop, and Gosia a broom, while in each hand, Annie held a bucket of water. It looked as though they had come to clean the flat and must have been warned by the concierge that they would find me there.

The three stood staring at the bed in a suspended state of shock until Annie plunked down her buckets, wailing, “Poor Jeanne.” Water sloshed from one of the buckets onto the floor.

Gosia dropped the broom and put her arm around the girl. “Poor Jeanne. Poor Amedeo,” she sniffled.

“A tragedy for us all,” said Hanka, quickly mopping up the spill.

Gosia drew a handkerchief out of her sleeve to blot her tears, but I knew she wasn’t weeping for me. She was weeping for my husband. What was I to her if not an obstacle? I knew she had been carrying on with him for months. What a fool she was to believe that Modi had cared about her. Didn’t she know that he seduced all the women he painted? As an Italian, it was for him a matter of pride, which I had come—however grudgingly—to accept. Some even believed he would marry them – others claimed he had fathered their children. He just laughed at that, but he adored Giovanna, our baby.

He had probably rattled on to Gosia while he was painting her, daydreaming aloud about going back to Leghorn. Gosia, like all the others, did not understand that when he talked of returning to Italy, it wasn’t really him talking. It was his mother speaking through him, her words he was repeating, some bedtime story she had told him once about how they would all go live in a pink house by the sea with a dining room suite and take tea like the English at five o’clock. Like a nursery rhyme, the story had stuck in his brain, and he would mumble bits of it to himself whenever he was fed up with living in cold, dirty rooms where the wind whistled under the door. But he would never ever have left Montparnasse to go back to live in Italy. He would never have abandoned me, not even in death. That was his dying promise, and I knew he would keep his word. I was the only one he loved: I, Jeanne Hébuterne, was his wife and muse. We were more married than married, he always said, under the watchful eye of his lucky black star.

Gosia stared morosely at the bare yellow walls. “This place looks so different without his pictures, without him. All the life has gone out of it.”

Hanka began picking clothes up off the floor, folding them, and piling them on a chair. “Zbo took everything away early this morning. People will be coming in and out, and new lodgers are arriving after the funeral. We couldn’t risk anything being taken. Soon every piece of his work will be worth thousands. Zbo will get back every centime he invested, multiplied ten thousand times. It has taken much longer with Modi, for some reason, than it did with Utrillo or Kisling, but now Modigliani’s moment is finally dawning.”

"Dawning with his death! And yet what difference a few good words would have made to him—to us—just a week or two ago."

“Didn’t Zbo want that self-portrait of Amedeo’s?” Gosia pointed out a sketch near the window. It was one I had done of Modi, his fedora aslant on his forehead, his sultry lips sucking on a pipe. We were always drawing each other. Even at the very end, I drew him, and I was concerned they might now find those drawings in my sketchbook if they started poking about. Those were very private drawings, which I never meant anyone else to see. One day I had planned to show them to him: This is you that time in January 1920, when you were so ill. Remember how scared we were? And you bound our wrists with a gold ribbon and said we were wed for eternity?

“Oh, that’s just a sketch Jeanne did.” Hanka flapped a throw rug out the window, raising a cloud of dust.

“Still, it is a very good likeness.” Gosia approached the sketch to study it. “It captures so well that reckless flair of his. Are you sure Jeanne did this? It is so similar to his style.”

I prickled with pride. I had learned to copy his line as confidently as if it were my own by memorizing the movement of his arm as he drew and practicing it over and over.

“Quite sure. If you look carefully, you’ll see that’s the work of a student, not a professional artist.”

“Yes, I think I can see what you mean,” Gosia agreed, squinting closer at the picture, then turning away to observe the room. “Poor Amedeo, despite his great gifts, he lived and died like a pauper. He deserved better than this.”

“No,” I protested, “We were richer than kings. We loved this studio. This was our home. We didn’t need money to be happy!”

“If it hadn’t been for Zbo, he would have starved to death—they both would have,” said Hanka, thrusting her chin at the bed. “It was a miracle he lasted as long as he did. We hoped that being from a good family, she might have some housekeeping skills: helping him mind his money, fixing him a meal now and then, keeping the studio decent in case a buyer wanted to drop by. You know how they all love to see the artist at work. Instead, all she thought about was s*x. And look where it got her.”

She shot a steely glance at Annie, who was still gawking at my sheeted body on the bed. “And let that be a lesson for you, too.”

Annie blushed, but didn’t reply.

Hanka bent down to retrieve some sardine tins from the floor and tossed them into an old pot collecting the drip from a leak in the roof.

“There’s sardine oil all over the floor. Open the windows. We have to get rid of this smell.”

While Gosia wrestled with the windows, I sat down on the bed next to myself and tried to explain it all to them.

“But you don’t understand. I tried really hard. I cleaned and cooked, but I had my own work to think of! You don’t realize how difficult it was sometimes with him, when he wanted you, you couldn’t resist. Gosia, you must know how that went! And when he was in a black mood, it was all you could do to keep from being sucked down into his whirlpool. After I got pregnant with Giovanna, I just couldn’t keep up. There was too much to do. And my parents weren’t any help. All they wanted was for me to give the baby up for adoption and move back in with them. But Modi would never have stood for that.”

“We need to have her ready when the undertaker comes. Annie, you go sweep and mop the studio and gather up all the trash. Leave us one of those buckets.”

Annie clumped back to the studio, with mop, broom, and bucket.

When Hanka approached the bed to pull back the sheet, both women gave a little gasp, as my green-blue eyes were wide open. Hanka lay her palm lightly on my swollen blue eyelids, but they wouldn’t close. Once lowered, they popped open again.

“How odd,” said Gosia, shrinking back from the bed.

“The undertaker will fix it with a dab of glue,” said Hanka. “Now we have to wash her. Bring me that basin on the dresser.”

How is it that an old worn thing, like Modi’s cracked washbasin, can hold an entire world?

Modi always used to wash himself from head to toe after a painting session. Sometimes he was very neat while working, as precise as a clockmaker. Other times he flung his colors about with wild energy, splattering blobs of red and yellow all over himself in the most unlikely places. When he was done, he would clean his hands and nails with oil, and then setting his washbasin on the window ledge, he would scrub his whole body with cold water and a sponge, singing arias in a lusty, tenor voice that rang out across the courtyard: “La donna è mobile, Qual piuma a vento” while deliberately squeezing a few drops from his sponge down to the courtyard below, upon the laundry or head of Madame Moreau. Feeling the sprinkle on her hair, she would look up at the windows and roar, “Who is dripping that water?” Seeing him there, with his thick black curly hair, his beautiful bare torso framed in the window, laughing at her with that sparkle in his eye, she would mumble, all contrite, “Monsieur Modigliani, please be more careful,” and that would be the end of it. No matter how ancient or acidic a woman might be, none could resist him.

It was this enamel basin with the cracked green glaze, over which he squatted to wash himself after we made love that Hanka now filled with water from the bucket, and brought to the bedside. After peeling off my soiled robe and nightgown, they proceeded to wash my body with clean rags they had found in the studio, wiping away the caked blood from my forehead, limbs, and feet.

“Find me something for her to wear,” said Hanka.

Gosia opened the trunk where I kept a few clothes, unleashing a smell of varnish, camphor and lavender into the air. I had brought that lavender from Nice, and now I longed to be back in the south again, lying in bed in the little hotel in Rue de France, drinking the coffee that Modi served me every morning, as I was too tired to get up and make it for him, because I had just had a baby.

“Everything looks too small,” Gosia remarked, rummaging through the trunk. “In her condition, I don’t think anything will fit.”

“The turquoise dress,” I suggested to the air—the only comfortable thing I had to wear when I was expecting Giovanna. It had a wrap-around skirt draped empire style from under my enormous bosom and big yellow daisies along the hem. Modi adored that dress—he loved to unwrap it and bury his face in my breasts. He said I was beautiful when I was pregnant, and he painted me in it twice. But of course, they could not hear me, and Gosia chose a dress I despised, an ugly tent-like bag of white crepe with red stripes, tight sleeves, brass buttons down the front, and a floppy red bow half-unstitched at the collar. Someone had given me this monstrosity which I had intended to cut up and use to make a Pierrot costume for Giovanna at carnival time.

“This looks big enough.”

I cringed as they pulled the hideous thing over my head and forced my rigid arms through the sleeves like broomsticks.

“Amedeo always said ‘Life is a gift,’” sighed Gosia. “What a terrible waste. She was so young.”

Hanka smoothed the dress down over my mountainous belly where it hardly fit and reached under my stiff legs to yank it down behind my calves.

“She would have been twenty-two next April. I am sad and sorry for her too. But I am also very upset. After all we did for her and Modi! I dread to think what might have happened if she had leaped out the window here, and not at her parents’ place. With the lease in Zbo’s name, we might have had trouble with the police! I don’t understand why she didn’t come to us before deciding to end it all. We would have gone on supporting her and the children, if only she had turned to us first. We would have done anything to help her.”